Pamela Hinkson - Seventy Years Young: Memoirs of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall

I wish to offer my most grateful thanks to my collaborator Miss Pamela Hinkson for her help in writing this book. I also thank Mr. Walter Callan, Mr. Gerald Heard, Countess Balfour, Dr. R. I. Best, Miss Charlotte Dease, Dr. Myles Dillon, Mrs. W. M. J. Starkie, Dr. George OBrien, Mr. T. U. Sadleir and Mr. Robin Watson for their kind assistance and encouragement.

E. M. F INGALL.

Lady Fingall ends her memoirs on a sombre note: a neighbours house has been burned by republicans during the Irish civil war; a messenger has arrived at Killeen Castle with the grim news that it is next on the list; the Earl and Countess gather their most precious possessions, huddle up to the study fire with the shutters closed and await the dreaded knock, retiring eventually in the pale light of morning. Killeen escaped then. The knock came sixty years later, long after the castle had passed from family hands, when a wing was set on fire during the H-block protests of 1981.

SeventyYearsYoung is an important book. The Earl and Countess of Fingall were members of the ancienrgime who, unlike many of their aristocratic contemporaries, did not pull up stakes and depart after independence, but chose to live on in what must sometimes have seemed to be an uncongenial, if not inhospitable, homeland. Lady Fingall was renowned for her ability to make friends and many of the influential figures of turn-of-the-century Ireland, and England, are quickly, if lightly, sketched in these pages. Her relationship with Horace Plunkett, one of the enigmatic personalities of the period, which remained central to all her extracurricular activity after her marriage, is more fully explored.

Lady Fingall was a Burke from Moycullen in Co. Galway. In 1883, after a whirlwind courtship, she married the eleventh earl, when she was seventeen and he twenty-four. Plunkett was the family name, and the Fingalls inherited a seat in the House of Lords. The Plunketts were heirs to the three peerages of Fingall, Louth and Dunsany. During the penal days the lords of Louth and Fingall remained Catholic, while the Dunsanys, in order to retain the family lands, became Protestant. When the necessity had passed the lands were returned to their Catholic kinsmen, but the religious distinction stayed in place.

Fingall, the somnolent Earl (he regularly dozed off after dinner), was as dull as the Countess was lively. Vivacious rather than beautiful, with a quick intelligence and a gregarious nature, she longed for travel and society, while he confined himself to horses and the great hunting county of Meath. It was an unorthodox partnership which might not have lasted as it did had she not discovered a sympathetic companion, and one who would provide a ready outlet for her talents, in the neighbouring castle of Dunsany.

Lady Fingalls relationship with Horace Plunkett is the thread which holds this book together. It lasted (probably unconsummated he was an exceptionally fastidious man) without ever rupturing the friendship with his cousin, the Earl. He remained a bachelor for the sake of Lady Fingall and was unquestionably in love with her. However, Bernard Shaw was to remark many years later, Yet I never felt convinced that he quite liked her.

Plunkett is now remembered as the father of the co-operative movement in Irish agriculture. He is less well known as one of the leading moderates in that critical era between the fall of Parnell and the polarization of Irish politics during the first decade of the twentieth century. The third son of Lord Dunsany, he was threatened with tuberculosis, which swept away two members of his family, and spent almost ten years cattle-ranching on the high, dry plains of Wyoming. Returning to Ireland on his fathers death in 1889, he mounted a campaign persuading Irish farmers to adopt co-operative methods of processing and marketing. A Protestant educated at Eton and Oxford, Plunkett was an unlikely campaigner among the farmers of the south and west of Ireland, but his sincerity and idealism were such that within five years a federation had been established (the Irish Agricultural Organization Society now the Irish Co-operative Organization Society) with several hundred member societies (co-operative creameries) attached.

It was a staggering achievement, but represented only the first part of a larger strategy, for he united farmers and industrialists, north and south, Catholics and Protestants, in an ultimately successful attempt to extract from the British administration Irelands first independent government ministry, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (with himself as Vice President), supervising farming and vocational education in the whole island.

Lady Fingall was, of course, involved with these schemes. She acted as hostess at Plunketts dinner-parties and as interior designer for Kilteragh, his house in Foxrock; she grew tobacco in her garden and cider apples in the orchard (Bottle of the Boyne was to be the slogan); and, in 1910, inspired by AE, in conjunction with the poet Emily Lawless (another Plunkett cousin), she became a founder-member of the United Irishwomen , which was a prototype for the Womens Institutes in Britain, and flourishes as the Irish Countrywomens Association today.

Plunketts position was, however, vulnerable (he had been an MP since 1892) for he had challenged the political statusquo. Lady Fingall describes the attacks on him, and on his movement , which came from both sides of the political divide. Unionists, in 1900, drove Plunkett from his parliamentary seat in South Dublin; and seven years later the nationalists had him replaced as Vice President of DATI by the uninspiring T.W. Russell.

Lord Fingall died in 1929, and Horace Plunkett in England in 1932 (as a Free State senator he had been burned out by republicans during the civil war). Lady Fingall moved to a flat in Mespil Road, Dublin, where she entertained on Thursday afternoons. (Terence de Vere White has included a charming picture of these occasions, and of an ageing, fragile but still vivacious Lady Fingall, in his autobiography, AFretfulMidge.) She died in 1944. Her memoirs, commissioned by Collins and dictated to Pamela Hinkson (daughter of the poet Katharine Tynan) had appeared seven years earlier. One tantalizing feature is the collection of letters from distinguished acquaintances which are quoted verbatim, and which have since vanished. Lady Fingall herself discloses that she destroyed Earl Haigs letters they described too many manoeuvres (not all, possibly, on the battlefield). Enquiries of her descendants produced only a typescript of the memoirs (now in the National Library of Ireland) and the guest-book from Kilteragh (now in Trinity College Library). The typescript quashed rumours, current in Dublin for some time, that the original version of SeventyYearsYoung contained racy passages, later omitted on the advice of George OBrien, the cautious Professor of Economics at UCD. It remains, however, a fascinating book, none the less so for Lady Fingalls throwaway remark, made in later life to a much younger contemporary: My dear man, I never slept with either King Edward or Sir Horace Plunkett!

Trevor West

Trinity College, Dublin
April 1991